In the exhibitor and conference industry, office furniture is repeatedly transported in trucks, unpacked, set up, used, and then packed back into the trucks for transportation to a warehouse or other storage facility. Some pieces of furniture—conference tables, media screens, speakers, are fairly easy to pack; they can be laid flat, rolled up, or packed into road cases and then placed into the truck. Items such as these may be densely packed because they are either small or large but heavy.
Some types of furniture, such as office chairs and table tops, present packing issues, however. Table tops generally have to be completely dismantled. And even though office chairs are relatively light, they are quite large and cumbersome. They cannot be laid flat, rolled up, or packed into a box. Indeed, they cannot even be disassembled: almost all office chairs have a seat back and a seat bottom mounted on a seat plate. The seat plate connects to a gas lift or non gas-lift cylinder that is mounted in a wheelbase. The seat back and seat bottoms are typically fastened to each other, either directly or indirectly through the arm rests, with many fasteners that are laborious to remove but easy to lose once removed. The seat bottom is bolted to the seat plate. The cylinder is press fit into and between the seat plate and the wheelbase. This press fit is nearly impossible to undo without destroying, or at least damaging, the rest of the chair.
Gas cylinders typically have an external sleeve and a rod which reciprocates in the sleeve. The rod is usually directed upward while the sleeve is downward, such that the rod is press fit into the seat plate and the sleeve is press fit into the wheelbase. A fastened socket in the seat plate receives the rod, and a socket—generally a circular hole—in the wheelbase receives the sleeve. When the chair is assembled in this fashion and a user sits in the chair, the rod and sleeve further press into the seat plate and the wheelbase, setting the gas cylinder securely. Over just a few hours, the gas cylinder is driven into a firm and very secure press-fit engagement with the seat plate and the wheelbase. Over days, months, and years, the gas cylinder becomes nearly permanently seated into the seat plate and the wheelbase.
Nevertheless, office chairs do sometimes need to be moved, such as is the case for chairs used in the conference industry. When chairs are transported and stored, instead of being packed and stored neatly like tables, screens, or speakers, the workers actually throw the chairs into an open back of a truck. This causes a fair amount of damage to the chairs. Wheelbases break, casters are torn off, arm rests shatter. In a short amount of time, a chair treated in this manner must be replaced. An improvement which allows a chair to be more readily packed, transported, and stored is needed. Such a device would not only be useful for disassembling office chairs, but also for disassembling high-top tables that use gas cylinders as the supporting leg or legs. Indeed, such a device would be useful for a variety of situations in which a body is press-fit onto a round fixture such as a gas cylinder.